Is Ogling Women a Form of 'Harassment' & 'Abuse'?

http://www.glennsacks.com/blog/index.php?tag=enewsletter072208

In the recent www.feministing.com post Two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to
harassing women, Jessica Valenti quotes from Reuters:
Nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed
women...and a majority say women themselves are to blame for their
maltreatment, a survey showed Thursday.

The forms of harassment reported by Egyptian men, whose country attracts
millions of foreign tourists each year, include touching or ogling women,
shouting sexually explicit remarks, and exposing their genitals to women.

"Sexual harassment has become an overwhelming and very real problem
experienced by all women in Egyptian society, often on a daily basis," said
the report by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights

Valenti adds:

83 percent of Egyptian women reported having been sexually harassed,
almost half of these women said the abuse occurred every day. Yikes.

Details of the report by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights can be found
here.

My problem with what Reuters and Valenti wrote is a problem I often have
with feminist claims -- harmful acts are mixed together with harmless ones.
We are given a seemingly alarming statistic without knowing which part of
the statistic is comprised by harmful acts and which part is comprised by
harmless acts.

In this case, we are told that the harassment being reported includes
"touching or ogling women, shouting sexually explicit remarks, and exposing
their genitals to women." Pardon me, but there is a hell of a difference
between touching/groping/"exposing genitals" to women and ogling women.

For one, ogling women is natural and harmless. Many women enjoy the fact
that men are demonstrating that they are attractive. Many women I've known
have boasted about the ogling and/or remarks. Reuters calls the harassment
"abuse," but merely being ogled is in no way "abuse."

Does anybody really think that a man who ogles an attractive Arab woman like
Emmanuelle Chriqui (pictured) is a "harasser" or an "abuser"? All it really
means is that he's male and has a pulse.

If, however, most of this sexual harassment is groping or exposing genitals,
then I think Egypt has a real problem. If most of it is just ogling, then
this report means little. I do not see the forms of harassment broken down
in any of the media reports or Valenti's report. If anybody knows of where
I can find the breakdown, please let me know.

I feel the same way about the alleged "blaming" of women for the harassment.
Such blame often angers feminists, and Valenti seems to agree. Again
though, the "blaming" is not very meaningful unless we know what kinds of
acts we're talking about. For example, it is ludicrous for a man who has
exposed his genitals to a woman to blame her for what he did. This is
similarly true with groping. In both cases, the men deserve to be punished,
regardless of what the women were (or were not) wearing.

However, if we're only talking about ogling, the rules are different. I've
always found it silly the way some women go way out of their way to dress so
that men will notice them and be attracted to them, and then pretend to be
"offended" when men look.

Cultural traditions in Egypt push women towards dressing conservatively, so
I'm not sure how much women's mode of dress fits in here. I traveled some
in the Arab world in the mid-1980s, and my experience was that some women
dressed in a very Western manner, while others dressed in a very
conservative, Moslem manner. In the major cities, it was more of the former
than the latter, and the reverse in the countryside.

On the larger issue, the way women are treated in certain parts of the
Muslim world is appalling. One example, from when I traveled in Morocco:

I was walking down a street and a veiled woman was walking on the same
sidewalk as I was, coming the opposite way. Suddenly she turned down into a
doorway, kneeled down, and pulled her robes over her.

I was only 19-years-old and didn't know a damn thing -- I thought she was
sick, or injured, or in trouble. I went up to her and tapped her on the
shoulder and tried to ask her what was wrong. (This was in Morocco, where
much of the population speaks French, and at the time I spoke French fairly
well, so she probably was able to understand what I was saying).

As I talked to her, she seemed to be increasingly agitated and she waved her
hand at me asking me to go away. After a while, I left, with misgivings.

Afterwards I was informed by a couple other Moroccans that since I was a
Westerner, were she to look me in the eye or in any way interact with me,
she would be branded a whore. Seeing her afraid like that was a sad and
moving experience.

Posted in Misogyny, Gender Issues (Misc.) | 113 Comments »



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